One of the challenges of business operations and continued deployment of information technology is the increasing power demands that the systems require. The ability to supply this increasing power demand may even discourage companies from successfully operating more modern systems that demand more of their infrastructure than previous buildouts can accommodate. Existing datacenter rack density technologies have already eclipsed many corporations' abilities to provision an adequate power and cooling infrastructure. Advancing capabilities in computational systems are consuming electricity with geometrically increasing rates. Heat dissipated by a computer system must be offset by cooling equipment in order to keep the computer system and it's components operational temperature within specifications for functionality, long life and reliability. However, the cooling systems themselves require even more electrical power to operate. The result of this combined computing and cooling power load is that many data centers often use much more than 100 Watts per square foot to operate the facility. This power density is more than 10 times the density of the average office. Increasing system power demand is driving the cost of datacenter operations up as much as 25% annually and making it a significant growing consideration in the total cost of ownership (TCO) for computing equipment. It is estimated that within five years, it will cost $4 million a year to cool an average data center; that cost is up from roughly $1 million today. Some companies spend about 10 percent of their entire power budget on power to keep data centers cool enough for reliable computer operation.
Similarly, the cost of managing the power resource expenditure is problematic. As the ability to consume power exceeds the ability to reliably provision it, some systems may be pressing the envelope of acceptable operations, thereby creating a more fragile and vulnerable system. When operating at the edge of a system's capacity even very small power problems lasting a fraction of a second may cause problems that can take many hours of precious operations staff to recover.
Storage devices can occupy as much as 75% of the floor space in computer centers; making storage in many systems the biggest single load in the datacenter. The total world wide information volume generated annually is about 1.5 exabytes (1×1018), and is growing at an exponential rate. A more recent accelerator to this information volume is the wealth of analog information and rich media which are increasingly being managed using digital facilities. Naturally, there are also new and increasingly available ways to capture and generate higher and richer definition information within digital systems. It is estimated that 93% of rich media content is now born digital; occurring first in a digital format.
It is observed that the densities for magnetic disks have increased more than 60% a year since 1990. The shipped mechanical hard drive capacity is more than doubling every year. The cost for a gigabyte of storage on disk drives is declining much faster on magnetic disks than it is on optical media or tape. In 2004, a 3.5″ advanced technology attachment (ATA) drive storage will be cheaper than super digital linear tape (SDLT) tape cartridge storage. Industry rules of thumb have suggested that there has been about 10 times as much storage on tape as on hard drives. This fraction has been falling dramatically as more and more data is maintained online in spinning magnetic media in the form of mechanical hard drives. This spinning media based data is decommissioned very slowly compared to its online growth. Consequently, both old and new data is being placed and maintained on spinning mechanical drives. Keeping data on hard drives has several advantages beyond price such as being quicker to access, of more consistent methods and much more versatile to use than tape drives. Additionally, there are generally operational difficulties common to tape backup and near-line schemes such as their handling, maintenance, and related costs.
The cost of managing storage hardware generally ranges from two to ten times its acquisition cost. The fastest growing segments of the storage markets seem least equipped to manage this growth. Usage on microcomputer based operating systems may generate now more than 80% of the new digital storage demand, but offer storage management tools that are years behind standard mainframe tools. A typical storage administrator can manage from 400-600 gigabytes of disk storage on micro and distributed platforms versus the more than 40 terabytes on a mainframe. Further, these mainframes have operated at much lower power per square foot requirements. When replaced with these more popular micro computer system solutions, the updated computer configurations challenge the capability of the legacy facilities and make the replacing systems more susceptible to heat and power related failures. New techniques for power and thermal management of computer system facilities is clearly desirable.
Although storage power management for mobile systems has seen many advancements, the fundamental principles and techniques underlying the roles and deployment of servers with respect to power management have lagged. Server storage power controls which can manage data loads and growth are virtually nonexistent.
In most servers, the data accessed daily is a very small percentage of the total data available online within the system. Some estimates are that over 90% of digital information activity occurs to less than 5% of the online storage. Stated another way, most of the data maintained and available online at great expense is only rarely accessed. As a result, most of the data on spinning drives can remain unaccessed for months.
Thus, there is a need to provide operations, budgeting and management schemes for servers to manage the expenditures in power, thermal control and hardware with current and future systems as data requirements continue to grow.